BI adoption reaches maturity

The adoption of business intelligence (BI) among South African organisations is moving towards the maturity stage.

This was one of the key findings of the ITWeb-Microsoft Business Intelligence Survey, which ran from 28 March to 11 April.

Attracting a total of 185 respondents, the survey asked about the current status of BI adoption in companies.

Some 17.26% of the respondents said adoption is at a mature usage stage, while the same percentage also revealed that it is at a mature deployment stage.

However, 16.67% said they were unsure, with 15.48% saying BI is still in the roll-out phase. Some 14.29% indicated it is still in a decision phase, and 11.31% said it has reached the planning period.

It also emerged that the majority of organisations (65%) are using Microsoft BI platforms. This was followed by SAP, attracting 25% of the respondents. The IBM Cognos platform came third on 22% while Oracle garnered 19%.

The survey also determined that most organisations (44.52%) deploy BI solutions for quicker decision-making processes. Some 23.87% of the respondents believe BI will come in handy for improving their efficiencies, while 11.61% said it can improve customer service.

On the other hand, 7.1% of the respondents noted that they deploy BI solutions in order to grow their revenue, with only 2.58% saying BI serves as a cost-cutting solution. The same percentage also revealed that it is for improved time-to-market delivery for new offerings.
Asked about which primary type of BI application they use or provide to their organisations, 29.03% stated they make use of it for corporate performance management, closely followed by customer analytics (27.74%). Sales analytics came next at 21.94%.

The survey also discovered that the majority of organisations (27.74%) are unsure how much they spend annually on BI technologies. Some 17.42% said they spend at least R1 million or more, with 18.71% noting they budget from R100 000 to R499 000 for BI technologies per year.

Most organisations believe the primary value determined from their BI implementation is reporting what happened (38.06%), followed by monitoring (24.52%), with analysis coming third at 23.23%. Prediction finished the list on 14.19%.

Probed about the primary barrier to broader adoption of BI in their organisations, 27% cited cost, while 23% blamed data irregularities. Only 12% pointed out that BI strategies are hard to determine ROI.

Most companies' data warehouses (22.58%) are 50GB in size, the survey also unearthed, while 15.48% claimed they do not have such infrastructure.

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